Crazy ideas 20070514

I don’t know what’s going on inside my brain lately but I’m finding myself disapproving my own ideas most of the time.

It’s not that I’m being too strict with myself (as somebody told me once), the problem is that these ideas are going past the point in which I can accept them as feasible (at least understanding ‘time’ as the most limited resource which could prevent them from being executed).

One of those ideas was to create a new programming language which would have more consistent naming conventions (specially when compared to php’s) and partly ruby’s syntax but would be easier than ruby to deploy to any server because there would be an intermediate parser which could translate it to the server’s language of choice. Let’s ignore for a moment that there’s already something like that, although translating to something edible by a virtual machine (Java) and let’s ignore as well there is also something quite similar which can be used for both client and server sides (haXe).

Like if I didn’t have better things to do than writing a compiler in php (without lex or yacc or anything!). If it’s already complicated to write a compiler in c, using those tools, I don’t even want to consider the idea of implementing grammars in php. No! It was annoying enough to do it with Pascal, years ago, in the Compilers course. I had enough!

But it would be so cool to have an each method in every object to iterate, like in ruby… and you could deploy it to any cheap php server… and no worries about firing up applications, ports, mongrel instances and all that stuff, my brain insisted. And I kept saying to myself no, no, no, forget it!

Other day the theme is hardware and apple modding. AppleTVHacks is a good source of (crazy) ideas. During some hours I had the determination of buying some new 2.5” hard drives and spend a week-end hacking the apple tv and my new mac mini. All of this while repeating to myself: hold on hold on hold on! the warranty hasn’t expired yet, the warranty hasn’t expired yet, because both are less than one year older. And then my brain answer with a solution: I could upgrade my beloved powerbook’s hard drive. It would be so cool, going from 80gb to 120gb! The horror!

But I found a way for scaring these crazy thoughts out from my mind: writing them down is kind of similar to a mental flush and in a way makes me forget about them. Like swapping them from RAM to disk cache… first they are here and then taaadaaa! they aren’t here anymore, but written down somewhere. Then you make sure you don’t look at that paper any time soon, and next time you find the annotation, you smile (or laugh, it depends) with the mere reading of those crazy ideas.